I must have missed it somehow — or perhaps it just didn’t sink in, because the words were just too ridiculous for my mind to comprehend — but an AT&T executive last week floated the idea of filtering everything that goes across the telecom giant’s network, according to this piece at Slate by law professor Tim Wu (who I would like to nominate as the new Larry Lessig) and also this New York Times piece. Apparently AT&T’s James Cicconi thinks that going through your virtual mail — opening every package and checking the contents — would a great idea.

It’s odd that this bizarre suggestion comes from a guy who is involved in legal affairs, since as Tim Wu points out in his Slate piece, implementing what Cicconi is talking about would undo decades of legal and regulatory history as it applies to the major telecom carriers, and open AT&T up to an almost limitless array of potential lawsuits and other legal action. At the moment, carriers are protected because they don’t filter things for copyright infringement, etc. Once they do, all bets are off.

From the sounds of it, AT&T has been talking to the record industry and the movie industry (i.e., the RIAA and the MPAA) about technology that could fingerprint copyrighted material — which brings me back to a topic I wrote about recently, in which I wondered what would happen if everything was “watermarked.” Could the telecom carrier argue that checking files for such watermarks or fingerprints wouldn’t be a violation of the common carrier principle, and therefore AT&T wouldn’t be exposed to liability? That may be what they have in mind.

For more on this issue, be sure to check out the debate that the New York Times has been running between Tim Wu and NBC lawyer Rick Cotton — which includes a proposal to redefine the concept of “fair use” — as well as an interesting post on Torrentfreak by Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, who argues that piracy is often a sign of an inefficient market. The New York Times piece in which Cicconi floated the filtering idea also has about 400 comments, many of which are worth reading.

Scott Karp, the managing director of research and strategy for Atlantic Media (which publishes Atlantic Monthly, among other things) gets on a bit of a rant about bloggers and the “mainstream” media. For a guy whose blog is called Publishing 2.0, I find Scott’s vituperation about blogging a little over the top. Yes, it’s true that the blogosphere can be a bit of a funhouse-mirror sometimes, and it’s also true that some zealots take the open-media, everyone-is-a-content-creator thing a little too far.

Scott is right when he says that many people are drowing in media, and are looking for filters and ways of sorting out what is necessary or useful to them and what is not — and he is also right that tools such as Technorati.com and RSS are not easy enough to use for the novice (not yet). It’s also true that many people will continue to use newspapers and other traditional media as filters in that sense — I hope they do, since I work for a newspaper. The media outlets that succeed will be the ones that seize that opportunity most aggressively.

At the same time, however, I think blogs are becoming — and will increasingly become — the filters for people on subjects they are interested in, whether we (or they) call them blogs or not. If you’re interested in dogs, or childbirth, or local news about mountain biking, are you going to seek out the traditional media to find resources or points of view? Unlikely. What will probably happen is someone you know will mention a blog that is written by someone who is equally obsessed with that topic, and which gathers all the information and links you might want.

That is competition for the newspaper, and the radio and the television — heck, it’s competition for books and needlepoint, for that matter. And as Lloyd of the Guardian points out, there’s opportunity there for traditional media, something Matt McAlister has some thoughts about too.

Update:

Just came across another of Scott’s posts on his blog, which indicates that his views are actually fairly close to mine — in other words, that “new” media such as blogs and traditional media need to collaborate, intermingle, cross-pollinate etc.

His post addresses an interesting discussion by Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine, who wonders whether a BusinessWeek magazine cover story would have been better if it had been open to contributions while it was being written.

I would argue that it would have been better in almost every way — not just as an article, but in terms of the long-term, spinoff effects of the process as well, although Stephen Baker says we aren’t quite there yet and there are reasons why media outlets need to keep stories secret.

If you’ve experimented with “social bookmark” sites such as digg.com or del.icio.us as a way of filtering the web (something I wrote about here), you may have come across reddit.com. When I mentioned it in a recent column for the Globe and Mail about Yahoo’s acquisition of del.icio.us, I got an email from one of Reddit’s co-founders, Alexis Ohanian, and we started a kind of ad hoc interview about the deal and about Reddit’s business model.

Alexis said that he felt Yahoo’s purchase had “validated the ‘business model without a business model’ approach of del.icio.us,” (something that not everyone thinks is a good idea), but that he was “curious to know how whether or not it’s an anomaly,” adding that “one look at reddit and you can guess what we’re hoping for.” I asked whether reddit.com was modelled on del.icio.us, and he said it was — but that Reddit wants to do something different as well. “We were actually inspired by del.icio.us/popular,” Alexis said. “We found ourselves most interested in this page because it was a sort of zeitgeist for what people were busy bookmarking — but we wanted to take it further.”

The Reddit co-founder, who was part of a “summer camp for startups” along with his college roommate Steve Huffman — and was in a movie called Aardvark’d — said that while there are “aesthetic similarities in the minimalist designs of our sites,” reddit.com is “trying to build a very different site.” As a Guardian article on the site pointed out, Reddit users can vote an article up or down in popularity (in much the same way Slashdot modifies comments) and they get “karma points” if something they linked to is voted onto the front page (Solution Watch has a nice overview).

As for a business model, Alexis didn’t give me much to go on, but he said that the two friends “started on reddit with the hope of being acquired one day, but as the project evolved we started exploring a model that could (hopefully) be sustainable.” He said there have been “overtures,” but that he and his partner are “loving this ride and we want to see how far it will take us.” As for venture capital, the company has met with a few but hasn’t taken any money. “We secured angel funding in August,” Alexis said, “that should, given our bare bones lifestyle (2 guys in a Cambridge apartment), last us until the thaw of summer.”

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions, Alexis. I think reddit.com has some interesting twists on the del.icio.us model that make it potentially more useful, but whether that translates into financial success is the multimillion-dollar question. Best of luck to you and Steve.